PEARL 31

Picking Up Belongings

The unofficial world record for trashing a living room was set in early

1987 by a Colorado lad named Bobby. In forty-five seconds, this five-
year-old tornado could bounce seventeen teddy bears down two flights of
stairs and scatter three cylinders of Lincoln Logs, two complete sets of
Legos, four boxes of Crayola 64s, and enough plastic army men to invade
the next county. By the time he’d dumped his big sister’s 500-piece
puzzles, you couldn’t even see the carpet. Not a bad minute’s work,
Bobby would say to himself as he surveyed his handiwork, but it’s sure
too messy in here to play. I’m going down to the basement.
Kids and their toys. We can be sitting in relative order one minute, but
let kids loose with their belongings, and before we can turn a page in the
evening paper, the room is trashed. Who usually cleans it up? Us. It’s a
double whammy. We have to do the work, plus our children don’t learn
how to care for their belongings.
Modeling is the secret to instilling a sense of responsibility about
personal belongings. Our kids will do as we do. Unfortunately, some
parents can’t blame their kids for not picking up their toys. Mounds of
clothes drape the chairs of the master bedroom, and it took two hours to
find the mower in the garage the last time the lawn needed a trim. These
parents don’t take care of their own belongings. As kids enter the stage in
their lives when they want to be big and feel big, they imitate the big
people in their lives — their parents.
In addition to using actions to model, we can also talk to ourselves or
to our spouse in order to get the point across. For instance, talking about